The present invention relates generally to improvements of stringed musical instruments and, more particularly, to an easily transportable electric double bass while keeping the same sound quality and playing feel of a traditional acoustic double bass. The invention can be applied to various bowed stringed instruments belonging to the violin family such as cellos, violones, and other like stringed instruments. However, the invention is particularly advantageous when applied to an instrument such as a double bass. This specification is written to be understandable by any person who, at least, have already seen a bowed stringed instruments and who basically knows how it works to emit sounds following the musician action on the instrument itself. So, the most common parts of this type of instruments, and concepts like sound chamber or intonation, are taken for granted and assumed as a necessary basic knowledge to completely understand the description of the invention.
Transporting stringed musical instruments is an endeavor with many perils. This is especially true for stringed musical instruments like the double bass due to its size and fragility. The top, back, and sides are typically constructed of spruce and maple, usually not more than ⅜″ thick; the standard dimensions of a ¾ acoustic double bass (not the biggest size for this kind of instrument but still the most common) are approximately 74″ height×27″ width×25″ depth. Furthermore, the double bass is usually more expensive and, due to its fragility, a slight bump in the wrong place can cause the neck to snap completely off or to crack in some parts of the body (to take some quick examples), compromising the instrument's functionality and usability, requiring difficult, precise, specialized, and expensive repairs.
The first solution to the difficult transportation and safekeeping of the double bass is to carry it in a hard shell case. Unfortunately, hard cases are very expensive and at the same time very bulky. They are too bulky to fit comfortably in cars and, moreover, are typically larger than the limitations imposed by air lines concerning carry-on baggage. However, even if the instrument is allowed on the airplane, either as carry-on baggage or checked baggage (upon payment of expensive fees), damage to the instrument being transported in a hard shell case is rather common. Obviously, the problem cannot be solved using a soft bodied case: even though it can be less bulky, it cannot surely reduce the bulkiness of the double bass itself offering, regardless, inadequate protection for the instrument during travel, always at risk to be subjected to bumps. Furthermore, with heightened security measures at airports presently in effect, many airlines refuse to transport double basses at all.
A second solution is to rent an instrument at your destination. In addition to the expense of renting an instrument (usually not refunded to the musician), rental instruments are often of inferior quality, dissimilarly configured, and of unfamiliar setup or “feel”. Consider for example an international musician that, during an international tour of several dates, needs to rent a double bass at each location he plays: it becomes a big waste of time planning how and where to rent, ending up using a different instrument at each gig, all the while having to take on all rental costs and, obviously, having a bad effect on musician's performance.
Consequently, due the obvious impossibility of easy, quick, and economical transport of an acoustic double bass, the solution was to create an electric double bass, also named electric upright bass (EUB). In these instruments, the sounding body is replaced by a much smaller and less bulky solid body (or, sometimes, a “skeleton” body, made up only by the frame of the body) minimizing the elements necessary for a double bass that could be played by musicians trained on traditional double basses. The sound amplification functions are entrusted to electronic devices such as microphones or piezoelectric pickups positioned on or near the bridge. With this smaller and thinner body the instrument is surely less bulky laterally and much less heavy, but its height remains very hard to handle, so some prior art electric upright basses can be disassembled by breaking down the neck from the body, disassembling other elements like the tailpiece, or equipping the instrument with a telescopic endpin, to ease transportation. But all of these prior disassembling methods are stopped by the obstacle of the neck and fingerboard integrity: the fingerboard must be solidly attached to the neck, and the fingerboard is longer than the neck itself, so the fingerboard is the longest part of the instrument that can't be splitted or disassembled because the main and essential purpose of the fingerboard is to be perfectly smooth and without any junction points or gaps, to allows the musicians to play with the perfect and right intonation that they are able to do.
All these improvements allow the electric upright bass to fit in a smaller hard case, able to fit in turn into a car, for example.
Electric upright basses appear to be the final solution for double bassist allowing them to have instruments that could always be carried easily everywhere, but this solution makes the sound of the instrument poorer in tone and quality, less brilliant, warm, and “acoustic”, resulting in a sound that is very different from that of a real acoustic double bass. The sound is so different, that the electric upright bass became essentially a separate category of instruments, due its unique sound completely different from that of a real double bass in terms of feedback, brilliance, groove, sustain, tone and presence. Some electric upright basses have a small, hollow resonant chamber, but it isn't enough to fill the gap of sound quality compared to acoustic double basses.
Thus, what is needed is a stringed acoustical instrument that can be disassembled in an easy and fast way to become as small and as light as possible and that can be easily transportable by car, plane, and all other modes of transportation. All of these features are necessary without sacrificing sound quality, the playability, the musician's feel, and the authenticity of the sound.
However, no previous attempts completely solved the problem described above as well as the present invention.